In May of 2023, Sweta Vikram was overwhelmed with grief. In the span of three days, her father died, her father-in-law died, and it was the 9-year anniversary of her mother’s death. When she looked for information on how to survive the maelstrom of emotions, she found reassurances that she would eventually get to the other side, but nothing that showed her how to do that. So, Sweta set out to create the resource she was looking for and recently published, The Loss That Binds Us , a manual with 1...
Jul 17, 2024•40 min•Ep. 294
Camille Sapara Barton is a social imagineer who is reimagining how we define and relate to grief. As a writer, artist, and somatic practitioner, Camille is looking to create a new grief narrative expansive enough to include multiple forms of individual and collective grief, especially for queer, trans, and BIPOC communities. In Camille's book, Tending Grief , they offer rituals and embodied practices for feeling into and metabolizing grief. Camille's lived experience with grieving death & no...
Jul 11, 2024•38 min•Ep. 293
Cody Delistraty is a journalist and he's also a son whose mother died of cancer. These two identities intersect in his new book, The Grief Cure , which chronicles his quest to find a way to eliminate the pain of grief. After exploring Laughter Therapy, silent meditation, Breakup Bootcamp, and other avenues for grief expression, Cody landed where so many others do: realizing the "cure" for grief is allowing it to exist, while still engaging with life. We discuss: Who Cody was when his mom died Ho...
Jun 26, 2024•43 min•Ep. 292
It's impossible to speak for an entire community, especially when it comes to grief, but Sharice Burnett, LCSW , knows a lot about the ripple effect of loss in the Black and African American community in Portland, OR. Born and raised in the community, Sharice is a clinical mental health therapist and consultant dedicated to naming and dismantling the larger systemic barriers that stand in the way of Black children and families having access to culturally relevant support, particularly mental hea...
Jun 19, 2024•47 min•Ep. 291
Lisa Keefauver is a lot of things - she's a writer, speaker, educator, social worker, podcast host, mother, widow, and grief activist. She came to the last two titles when her personal experience of grieving for her husband Eric, who died of a brain tumor in 2011, intersected with her professional life as a clinician. At this intersection, Lisa realized just how grief illiterate the world is and how that illiteracy creates unnecessary suffering for those who are grieving. Lisa hosts the acclaime...
Jun 07, 2024•47 min•Ep. 290
The Autism & Grief Project is a new online platform designed to help adults with autism navigate and cope with the complexities of grief arising from both death and non-death losses. Alex LaMorie, A.A.S is a member of the project's Advisory Board and brings his lived experience with both autism and grief to this work. Dr. Kenneth J. Doka, PhD, MDiv , brings years of both professional and personal grief knowledge to his role on the project's Development Team. The Autism & Grief Project is...
May 31, 2024•35 min•Ep. 289
Have you ever heard someone’s voice in your head and suddenly you're transported to a time and place when you were with them? This phenomenon is what Lissa Soep explores in Other People’s Words: Friendship, Loss, and the Conversations That Never End , her book about the intimacy of friendship and how words and language keep people with us, even after they die. After the deaths of her friends, Jonnie and Christine, Lissa found comfort in this idea of them living on through their words. We discuss...
May 28, 2024•38 min•Ep. 288
Cristina Chipriano , LCSW, Dougy Center's Director of Equity & Community Outreach and Melinda Avila, MSW, CEO of OYEN Emotional Wellness Center , are committed to changing the landscape of grief support for Latino families. They bring personal and professional grief experiences to the work of ensuring that every Latino family has access to dual language grief support that honors their cultural values. We discuss: Cristina & Melinda's personal connection to this work Why it's important no...
May 14, 2024•1 hr•Ep. 287
We cannot separate grief from the context in which it occurs. This is true for Nicole Chung whose adopted parents died just two years apart in 2018 and 2020. The world of 2018 was very different than that of 2020. In 2018, Nicole and her mother could grieve for her father, together and in person. In 2020, Nicole was on the other side of the country, grieving for her mother in isolation during the early days of the pandemic. The other context that played a role in her parents' lives and their dea...
May 03, 2024•49 min•Ep. 286
Maybe you're familiar with the phrase, "You can't go around grief, you have to go through it." Or, "You have to feel your feelings." If you're like a lot of people, you might cringe and also wonder, "What does that actually mean?" Grief isn't linear, and it's not something to get through - and yet, a lot of people appreciate having some sense of what to expect and what to do with it all. That's where Claire Bidwell Smith's new book, Conscious Grieving, comes in. Offered as a framework, not a for...
Apr 04, 2024•34 min•Ep. 285
In 2015, Diane Kalu was living in Nigeria with her husband and their three young children. One day, about eight weeks after the birth of their third child, Diane’s husband went to work and never returned. A few days later she got the news that he dad died. She was suddenly a widow, responsible for raising three children under the age of five, in a country with several widowhood customs and traditions that are harmful to women. Thankfully, Diane had her mother to help her survive those early days...
Mar 24, 2024•39 min•Ep. 284
Read Transcript Whenever Annette & Mel connect, there's always a third person in the mix. That third person is Amy, their friend and chosen family member who died in 2012 of pulmonary fibrosis. While they each had a unique friendship with her, both connections were formative and deep. When Amy died, Annette and Mel's friendship grew stronger, because of their shared grief. This episode is part of a series focused on grieving the death of a friend. As much as we decry there being a hierarchy ...
Mar 20, 2024•56 min•Ep. 283
What if there was a place you could go in your grief and be both perfect and broken? That's the kind of place Laura Green dreamed up with her friend and co-founder, Sascha Demerjian. Together they created The Grief House , a community space for people to explore grief through movement, conversation, creativity, and care. Since she was very young, Laura can remember being afraid of death. Afraid of losing everyone and everything she cared about, especially her mother. Three years after starting T...
Mar 08, 2024•35 min•Ep. 282
In an instant, Leslie went from sharing every aspect of life with her husband Ryan to feeling like half a person. Leslie, Ryan, their two young children, and their extended family were on vacation in California when Ryan told Leslie that something didn't feel right. He was rushed to the hospital where he died of a stroke and an aneurysym, leaving Leslie to figure out how to live their life without him. The people Leslie most wanted to talk to in her grief were other widows. This inspired her to ...
Feb 22, 2024•53 min•Ep. 281
What happens when you put your grief on hold? In the summer of 2016, Channing Frye was riding high. After over a decade in the NBA, his team, the Cleveland Cavaliers, had won the Championship. Then, in the fall, he hit one of the lowest lows. His mother Karen died of cancer. Just a month later his father, Thomas, also died. Channing put his grief on hold to deal with the logistics of planning two funerals, supporting his family, and going back to work as a professional athlete. Eventually, with ...
Feb 10, 2024•44 min•Ep. 280
Dr. Donna Schuurman is back - this time talking about the dangers of pathologizing grief. While the term "complicated grief" has been used in various grief settings for years, it wasn't until March of 2022 that Prolonged Grief Disorder made it into the DSM-5-TR - the Diagnostical & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders - as an official diagnosis. This conversation explores the concerns Donna and others in the field share about the move to pathologize grief. We discuss: What Donna’s learned ...
Feb 02, 2024•46 min•Ep. 279
When Sat Kaur Khalsa, MSW, was three, her older brother died in a drowning accident. After his death, he continued to disappear - his photos were taken down and no one talked about him. As she grew up, she learned the implicit lesson to be a good kid because her parents were already dealing with enough. She also learned that grief wasn't something you talked about or shared with others. Now, as an adult, she's working to make sure kids her age get to have a different experience. Sat Kaur is the ...
Jan 19, 2024•50 min•Ep. 278
What does it mean to be grief-informed? In 2020, Dr. Donna Schuurman, EdD, FT, and Dr. Monique Mitchell, PhD, FT, authored the paper, "Becoming Grief-Informed: A Call to Action ," which outlines: what it means to be grief-informed, why it's so important, and Dougy Center's 10 Core Principles and Tenets of Grief-Informed Practice . This paper is based on the foundational understanding of grief as a natural and normal response to loss that is interwoven into a sociocultural context. It recognizes ...
Jan 12, 2024•48 min•Ep. 277
The reality for Black individuals and families living in the U.S. is that death happens more often and earlier on than for their white counterparts. In the last two decades, these higher rates of mortality resulted in 1.63 million excess deaths for Black Americans compared to white Americans. Doneila McIntosh brings her personal and professional experiences with this reality to her work as a researcher studying the intersections of disenfranchised grief among African American families. Disenfran...
Jan 05, 2024•40 min•Ep. 276
What started out as an average winter morning ended up being one that would change everything in Melissa Pierce's life. She went to wake up her husband Dave for their son's basketball game and found him unresponsive. Dave had died during the night and the cause of death was never determined. Melissa jumped into figuring out logistics - planning a memorial, getting her sons to school, moving their family, working a full-time job - but eventually she had to figure out herself. It meant focusing on...
Dec 20, 2023•44 min•Ep. 275
Dina Gachman's mother died of cancer in 2018 and less than three years later her sister died of alcoholism. A career journalist, Dina turned to writing as one way to make sense of these world altering losses. She recently published, "So Sorry for Your Loss," a series of essays that combine personal reflections with information she gathered from professionals working in the world of grief. In this conversation we discuss: How recalling memories of her mom and sister has become less painful Parent...
Dec 20, 2023•38 min•Ep. 274
In January of 2022, Adam Sawyer had everything he dreamed of and more. His partner Kara was the love of his life. Their cat Lela was his all-time favorite animal. Their off the grid house, Whiskey Jane, was the best place he had ever lived. By the end of February, 2022, Adam lost all three of them. Kara and Lela died when Whiskey Jane was destroyed in a fire. We discuss Getting "the call" about the fire Being fully immersed in grief with no responsibilities Nature's role in Adam's healing proces...
Dec 13, 2023•46 min•Ep. 273
It's our fifth annual holidays & grief episode! This time of year can be grueling for anyone, but particularly for those who are grieving. So, each year we put out an episode to help you feel less alone and hopefully more equipped to traverse the next few weeks. Today's guest, Melissa Peede Thompson, M.S., is a Grief Services Coordinator at Dougy Center. While she has lots of professional knowledge in this realm, we asked her to talk about her personal experience of grieving during the holid...
Dec 01, 2023•29 min•Ep. 272
When Meghan Riordan Jarvis's mother died suddenly, just two years after her father died of cancer, she watched herself grieving from two perspectives. One as a daughter and the other as a trauma-informed therapist. As a daughter she was devastated and deeply impacted on all levels. As a therapist, she recognized in her grief signs of PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. The therapist part of her also realized she wasn't getting better on her own and needed the next level of care. Meghan's new b...
Nov 22, 2023•49 min•Ep. 271
Bridget was in high school when her dad died of a heart attack in 2020. Their relationship was complicated. She loved the way her more creative side came out when they spent time together, but she also struggled with how he kept a lot of his history from her. In grieving for him, Bridget's had to reckon with two things being true at the same time. The first is that in some ways Bridget’s life became easier and more stable after he died. The second is the reality that she still loves him, misses ...
Nov 16, 2023•31 min•Ep. 270
When John's father died of suicide in 2021 it came as a complete shock. John couldn't square the dad he knew as cool and levelheaded with the reality that he took his life. He tried to figure it out - what was going on for his dad that led him to this? Over time, John began to better understand some of the factors that contributed to his dad's death. Throughout it all, he turned to his family, friends, and himself for support in navigating this new world without his dad. This series is a part of...
Nov 10, 2023•33 min•Ep. 269
Sonja was 15 when we recorded in the summer of 2023, but was just 10 when her father, Matt, died in September 2018 from injuries due to a car accident. Sonja, her mom, and two younger siblings lived in NYC at the time of his death. They eventually moved across the country to Portland, Oregon where they attended peer grief support groups at Dougy Center. Sonja shares what she remembers about hearing that her dad was in an accident, how their community showed up while he was in the hospital, and h...
Nov 03, 2023•40 min•Ep. 268
Alexandra Wyman and her husband Shawn had a bit of a whirlwind life. They got married in 2018, had their son in 2019, and then in 2020 Shawn died of suicide. His death created a different type of whirlwind. The kind where Alexandra had to rebuild her life as a solo parent dealing with the intense swirl of guilt, sadness, anger, and confusion. As the shock wore off, Alexandra started to write down what she was going through and learning along the way. This led to her new book, The Suicide Club - ...
Oct 21, 2023•43 min•Ep. 267
This was supposed to be an episode about going back to work with grief, but it's not. Emily did have to navigate going back to work after her partner Chantel was killed in a hit and run, but this conversation ended up being about love. And loss. And the magical powers of caring for a dog named Indie. It's also about bringing the love you had with a partner who died into a new relationship and what it's like to grow that love with someone else. We discuss How Emily and Chantel fell in love What s...
Oct 13, 2023•39 min•Ep. 266
Katie Cosgrove experienced the death of someone close to her every year between the ages of 15 and 21. The first was her father, who died of brain encephalitis. For the next five years, Katie did what so many teens do - she didn’t talk about her grief. Until she did. Now, she's the founder of Grief is Good and the author of new children's book, "I'll see you in your dreams tonight," which invites children (and adults too) to find ways to make new memories with their person who died. We discuss: ...
Sep 28, 2023•35 min•Ep. 265
